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French News Agency Sues Google News
n1ywb writes "CNN and others are reporting that 'News agency Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc., alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission. The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.' This means they're suing in America this time, not France, which means Google might actually care if they lose."
Now that Google's a publicly traded company flush with cash, many potential litigants are smelling blood.
Google is both suing and being sued by so many parties now it's hard to keep track, as a search on Google will show.
One of the cases involving images.google.com appears to me to be more of a publicity stunt by the plaintiff.
I think we can expect more such lawsuits.
I'm a big tall mofo.
However, the CNN article does state that AFP asked to be removed from Google News and that Google did not remove them, thus the lawsuit.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Please note the difference between a "news agency" and a "news site"!
It's not trivial to filter out press reports from a news agency.
News agencies sell their raw-stories to news sites. Google can easily remove a news site from their news index, but excluding some articles from a news agency appearing on various news sites is difficult...
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
There was a similar case shortly after the birth of the www. Site "A" sued Site "B" for quoting part of thier website and linking to it if readers wanted to read more. Imagine the horror, one site linking to another.
Anyway, the court decided it was not Copyright infringement because the original source was provided and given full credit, and some other factors.
Nothing to see here
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Because they can't; AFP doesn't own (all) the servers Google is taking AFP content from.
AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews. The result is that AFP content licensed by newspapers winds up on Google News, even though AFP did not allow Google direct access to AFP content.
No, wait, you don't understand what AFP is: it is a news provider, like Reuters, they don't really care if people go to their website or not, it is completely marginal in their business. Their job is to sell news (pictures / text) to other media (newspapers, radios, websites etc), which can then use it directly (reprint it) or use it as a basis for more complete, analytical articles.
So AFP does not really care how much coverage their content gets for free, in fact it is threatening as it "devaluates" the content: now anybody (and more importantly, any media) can have access to most of AFP's content minutes after it is broadcast, without paying for the (probably huge) monthly bill newspapers pay to AFP. (medias pay to get the right to access to AFP's network, through specific software and servers).
The fact is that Google is indexing and displaying that content without paying for it. But Google can (rightfully) argue that they are only indexing other websites (ie the newspapers who have paid for AFP content and displaying it as is on their own websites), and that therefore they're not violating any copyright law. But in the eyes of AFP, Google is using their content in an original form, displaying it on their own website, with their own layout.
So both companies have mostly valid arguments.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
I found their robots.txt file:
/beta /francais/news /english/news
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Now... was this present before or after the lawsuit started, and is google news the same as normal indexing?
It'd help if you'd actually use the guidelines specified for valuing if a work is covered under fair use.
Quotes from US Code Title 17, 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include
So, right away Google seems cleared. But, lets make it more clear since something like blatant plagiarism of a whole news paper would likely not be protected.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial. Your logic that a non-profit action attracts attention/money isn't relevant. By your logic no celebrity would have access to fair use since their non-profit statements would attract attention to them and conceivably make more money. The test is for if the work itself is commercial. Google News doesn't make money.
Second, Google News is for providing access to news. To claim news is uneducational in general is to ignore what news is. Now, if Google News started quoting from press releases by companies or one of the Government produced "news" releases, you'd have a much stronger argument. Such is propaganda and propaganda is not educational except in the general case that knowing what to look for it in propaganda.
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
The original was news as well.
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google. Just like Slashdot or fark, Google News redirects to pages in a way that if anything *increases* the market for the work. It's unlikely I'd ever even see a fraction of the news papers listed on Google News if it weren't for Google. Google News doesn't replace all these news sites. It's a nexus for finding them.
The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page. They include a small blurb and a link to the original site. While the Google Cache is likely dice, from the perspective of ad revenue being the market provider, search engines in general haven't really been questioned before. Google News is merely a search engine specifically geared towards news. If Google News is commit some illegal act by linking to news stories and including a blurb then so are most store catalogs, search engines, and tons of databases of information (lots of things one makes are copyrighted, after all).
So, I sincerely fear for what such would mean.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Fair Use
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."